#37: Reacting to life.

“I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it.”
-Charles Swindoll

Perspective never ceases to be the biggest factor in handleing stress. No matter what you face in life, your perspective will determine how you get through it. It seems, however, that we all struggle with actually maintaining perspective in the heat of the moment. True reality seems to escape our grasp whenever we are grasping for hope.

If it were always easy to remember how good life is, even in the bad times, then there truly would never be any bad times. Your unrealistic attitude on relevance would always allow you to stay above negative situations. This just is not the way that we were created. However, maybe there is something to be said about not focusing on avoding bad times, but rather on dealing with bad times. If we are prepared to react to the curveballs that life throws at us, then maybe the stress won’t seem so bad after all.

#36: Just let it go.

“Holding onto anger is like grasping onto a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the one who gets burned.”
-Buddha

If you have never been offended by someone, then you obviously have not spent enough time outside of your own four walls. You are going to get offended, mistreated, hurt. That is all just a part of life. Unfortunately, bitterness and a lack of forgiveness tend to be just as prevalent.

Hopefully this can simply be a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, then it don’t matter. Really though, forgiveness should be as easy as making a logical decision. Holding on to anger does not benefit you in any way. The reason any of us hold on to anger is because we feel that someone does not deserve forgiveness. Well, luckily, what they do or do not deserve is not up to us. So make life easier on yourself and just let it go.

#35: Really living

“Every man dies, but not every man really lives.”
-Braveheart

What does it look like to really live? Many people have many different definitions. To some the answer is never saying no. Always taking every opportunity that presents itself. This option, however, tends to have a high burnout rate and an even higher regret rate. Other people believe that really living is devoting yourself to a cause and abadoning all other desires to see that cause reach its greatest potential. This does have the tendency to lead to one-track mindedness and leave personal relationships in the dust. Still others believe that really living consists of developing themselves into well rounded people who have visisted all the cultural hubs in the world and have let their careers lead them into a desireable lifestyle. At the end of the day though, these people only have memories and toys to rely on instead of grounded quality of life.

Really living might look like this: Doing what you love with those whom you love. Wether that be travel, or work, or worship, or play. Whatever it is that makes you feel like the best version of you, do it. Just don’t do it alone. Let your passions drive you. Find a goal and stare it down. Don’t look back at life and wonder if it was really lived.

#34: Skyfall

“Let the sky fall, when it crumbles
We will stand tall
Face it all together”

-Adele (“Skyfall” 007 Theme)

This new song by Adele, which came out as the theme for the newest James Bond movie, Ponts to the importance of facing lifes problems together. Obviously most of us will not experience a dilemma as serious as the sky falling, although far be it from me to say it doesn’t feel like that sometimes.

You see, tragedy is all relative. The worst thing that happens to me in my life might be a walk in the park compared to what you have had to go through. Yet, this does not negate my experience or yours. There is no universal way to measure hardship, only the universal solution of not doing it alone.

#33: Failure

”I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

Ultimately, throughout the course of your life, you will experience failure. More so, I believe it is even safe to say that you will experience great failure. Human life is defined by the amount of times we need to fail in order to succesfully accomplish that which we set out to achieve. It is basic understanding that recovering from failure is important. It is also understood that failure is to be expected. However, do you ever feel encouraged in failure?

Not to say that you should ever attempt or expect to fail. Your confidence should be set in and of itself enough that you believe in yourself and your abilities. However, do not let a failure be a time of regret and second-guessing. Allow yourself to experience moments of failure for what they really are: passing moments. Failure is never anything to be feared but rather it should be confronted. It should be met with an ambition head on that is neither phased nor surprised by its presence. Let yourself fail, and enjoy moving on.

#32: An open mind.

“Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue.” -Scott Adams

Opinions are like freckles, everyone has at least one. I have talked before about treating your opinions like children, but now I would like to discuss the dangers in having those opinions. Whether it is about faith, science, politics, or day-to-day bureaucracy, it does not take long to find a handful of people with a strong opinion on any given issue. The problem with these strong opinions is that they are often times built out of experience instead of fact. Someone can sit through a lecture on evolution on walk away despising anyone who says the world was created by anything other than molecular diffusion. An individual can go to church their whole lives and be in absolute shock when someone does not believe in an afterlife. Both of these examples have in common the fact that the strength of their opinion is imbalanced with the indisputable proof they have to back it up.

Now, do not let me convince you that it is improper to hold opinions. Further still, it is not wrong to have strong opinions. However, I do concede that it is dangerous to be blind to other opinons when your own opinion is built out of a basically personal foundation. Be self-aware when your beliefs require more faith than fact. Be comfortable in your reliance on faith over fact. Just do not confuse the two, and in doing so weaken both your ability to perceive fact and practice faith.

#31: Starting Over

“For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be.” -The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Life sometimes feels like a snowball rolling down hill. The longer it keeps rolling, the more momentum it acquires. With that momentum comes a resolute feeling that it would be impossible to change directions. When you graduate high school the world seems to be filled with options and varying paths, you choose which one you want to wander down. As you go through college and your first few career steps, those paths begin to diminish and then narrow. Soon you have made so many decisions that it feels like you have no decisions left. You are stuck careening down the hill picking up speed.

However, what if you are unhappy? What if you wish you were rolling down a different hill? Is it too late to make a change in the game? The answer to that last question is no, it is never too late. It is never too late to go back to school or to start a different job or to establish another home. Never too late, but also never easy. Understand that you make your own decisions, and are forced to live with those decisions. Also understand that you are always bigger than the last decision you made, you never have to feel trapped or cornered by yourself. Find the right hill, and pick up speed. There is a lot of snow out there.

#30: Picking up where you left off.

One of the hardest things to do is press on without a specific goal or end-point in mind. If you are merely achieving milestone after milestone without actually taking the time to appreciate your benchmarks, you will soon find yourself burnt out. However, when you giver yourself an end, and the means with which to achieve that end, perseverance is attained.

In all this, do not let your shortcomings serve as a reminder of your weakness. Rather allow yourself to appreciate the “unplanned breaks” you give yourself and don’t be afraid to pick the baton back up and take off running. Don’t be afraid of the progress you have lost or the pain in starting over again. Just be happy that you already have a foundation built and have the ability to come back stronger than ever. Keep going.

#29: Record your dreams.

This gets a little trippy, but stay with me on this one. When it comes to analyzing dreams and the workings of the subconscious, Dr. Sigmund Freud pulls away as the expert in the field. I do not want to turn this into a psychological debate, so let me just remind you that Freud believed that our subconscious mind was influencing our conscious decision. Since dreams obviously happen in our subconscious, this is where I see a connection.

Most of us will brush off a dream as being the product of a late night eating binge or simply just having too much on our minds. What if dreams are actually a useful self-analyzation tool? It is not elementary to think that perhaps our mind is trying to tell us something about ourselves once we finally get out of our own way and fall asleep. So try keeping a dream journal. Chart how your dreams interact with your day-to-day life. Let yourself hypothesize a little bit and you might stumble upon a useful revelation.

#28: Take a break.

Remember elementary school when we got recess breaks? Even then, we were being conditioned to find time to blow off steam. Then we get to high school and college and we learn to enjoy the weekend. We crave our 2 days of freedom. We are programmed to have our batteries recharged.

Now we are employed. We have families. We have organizations and clubs. We now associate with people who don’t force us to slow down and take a break. So we allow ourselves to get caught up in the rush of life and learn a new lesson. We learn to feel guilty for taking a break. We find ourselves feeling lazy when we are not producing. So stay responsible. but also stay sane. Take your vacation days. Learn to find time in your day to ignore everything outside of yourself. You will be surprised at how much you learn from yourself.